


My Love, Remind Me

by ViaLethe



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Half-Sibling Incest, Identity Issues, Multi, Pre-Canon, Season/Series 01, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 06:52:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4696355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViaLethe/pseuds/ViaLethe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're all just chasing each other around in circles, Oliver thinks, keeping secrets that aren't really secret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Love, Remind Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Taste_of_Suburbia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taste_of_Suburbia/gifts).



> Takes place shortly pre-S1/early S1.

_**Thea**_

She comes almost immediately the first time he touches her, all trembling legs and desperate, clutching hands, and he laughs, his breath hot against her throat, and makes a joke about her being Speedy in this way too.

“Don't call me that,” she says, and shuts Tommy up the best way she knows, pushing him towards the bed, towards finally getting what she's always wanted.

 _It's a terrible nickname_ , she thinks, lips pressed to his, as if she could swallow his words, smother their memories between them.

 _You're not my brother_ , she thinks, and somehow they've missed the bed and slid to the floor instead, but that's okay, she thinks, that's appropriate, that they should be just a little bit off. Thea doesn't mix well with perfection, not these days.

 _Only Ollie called me that_ , she thinks, and tries not to remember the way Tommy hesitated, the way he'd broken off that first frantic kiss and asked “Hey, it's not your first time, right?” The way her mind had spun through variations on the truth ( _'Everything but – that counts, right?'_ ), before she'd given up and lied with a shake of her head, because life has taught her that lying is easier than the truth, safer than the truth. She tries not to remember the way he'd seemed relieved, like if someone had committed some kind of theft here, at least it hadn't been him.

 _I'll always be Oliver's sister first, and Thea second_ , she thinks, and wonders if it'll ever go away, the heavy tug at her core every time she thinks about Ollie, no matter how much she drinks, or how many pills she swallows. No matter how good Tommy feels right at this moment inside her, the closest she can get to her dreams coming true. That pain sticks around, and she closes her eyes and holds onto to Tommy and tries to pretend she's not drowning.

If she pretends hard enough, she thinks, maybe she can laugh instead of crying. Maybe he'll forget that she's broken, that _they're_ broken.

 _I wasn't speedy enough_ , she thinks. _I could never catch up_.

_**Tommy**_

He can't look at her without feeling guilty.

Not because he's fucking her, though he probably should feel worse about that, seeing as how she's seventeen, clearly in the kind of pain that Tommy is nowhere near being equipped to deal with, and oh yeah, just so happens to also be the closest thing he has to a little sister.

It's not because of any of that – if Tommy's being honest with himself, he's done worse and felt better about it.

No, if this is sick and fucked up – and it really, really is – it's all because of Oliver.

 _I didn't mean to steal your life_ , he thinks, every time he catches Oliver staring at him out of some old photo around the Queen house. _But god, I definitely wanted to._

He knows he's imaging that the photos look accusing, because Oliver had never seemed to mind it when he was still alive, the way Tommy had slid into his life like a carbon copy. Oliver was too secure to mind being generous, too secure in all the things Tommy didn't have – two parents who were alive and paid attention and seemed to understand affection, a home that felt like a place you wanted to be in, a little sister who treated him like a god in human form. He'd been happy to share all that, before.

And now Oliver's dead, and Tommy's walking into his house like he belongs there, like it's natural for him to hug Moira like she was his own mother, like it's acceptable for him to head up the stairs to Thea's room and walk in unannounced.

Like it's perfectly okay for him to close the door (quietly, cause something tells him no matter how much affection she shows him, Moira would _not_ tolerate what he's doing with her daughter) and put his hands on Thea.

“You feel amazing,” he tells her, and it's less coherent than he'd been hoping for, but it's still true – she _does_ feel amazing, every single inch of her as she straddles his lap, legs wrapped around his waist, her chest pressed up flush against his. She never opens her eyes, but she laughs when he makes her come, and that's probably more than he's got any right to expect.

 _You feel like home_ , he wants to say, but it's too weird, too close to that guilt tightening like a fist in his gut, because over her shoulder he can see Oliver, staring out unblinking from the photo on her bedside table.

He fits, he tells himself firmly, rolling Thea onto her back and focusing on her face instead, watching his hands thread through her hair, dark like his, not like Oliver's at all. Neither of them are really like Oliver.

Even a broken fit is better than none, he figures. Even a masquerade that's not quite right.

_**Oliver**_

Oliver knows he's a lost cause.

Maybe that's why he wasn't really surprised, the night he walked in on his best friend in his little sister's bed. Of course Thea had wanted to replace him, of course she'd needed to move on. And she deserved someone who could be there in all the ways Oliver hadn't, all the ways he still couldn't be.

He had been surprised that he'd just stood there instead of leaving, watching the way these two people he loves best wrapped themselves around each other; he thought he'd learned to lose that, following impulses that led nowhere practical.

And he'd been surprised when they'd noticed him, and there was no shouting, no excuses or apologies or threats. Just Thea and Tommy, and something acknowledged in a look between them, before Thea had reached out her hand, and against all sanity and good judgement, Oliver had taken it.

He thinks he understands more now though, now that it's been weeks and they haven't stopped, now that he can lie here with Thea between him and Tommy, with everyone's limbs tangled together until he doesn't know whose skin is hot against his, and doesn't care.

“You still in there, Ollie?” Thea asks, and he'd laugh at the absurdity of it, Thea's huge eyes staring up at him, Tommy peering over her shoulder; the way the two of them look to him, as though he isn't the most messed up of all of three.

“I am,” he says, and kisses her forehead, and doesn't say that he knows she's lost, that her world froze while she was locked into worshiping the boys she thought of as brothers, the way it's ruined her and reforged her into this.

Tommy meets his eyes when he pulls back, and Oliver manages to smile at him, and not talk about the way Tommy's been lost since his mother died, since he started making himself into who he thought everyone else expected him to be.

And Oliver very carefully fails to mention to either of them the ways that he's a different person now; they know it, of course, from the evidence of his hands and lips and tongue, from the scars on his skin, but they won't mention it if he won't. They're all just chasing each other around in circles, he thinks, keeping secrets that aren't really secret.

“We're all still here,” he says, and doesn't add, _because it's the only way we know to find each other_.

He might be a lost cause, but he can still protect them.


End file.
